MADONNA has spoken for the first time about her terrifying horse-riding fall and revealed: "My whole skeleton collapsed".

The singer broke her collar bone, ribs and hand in last August's accident.

Mum-of-two Madge, 47, fell after a friend persuaded her to ride a polo horse at her Wiltshire estate on her birthday. "I said I didn't really know how to ride a polo horse but my friend said: 'He's so tame'."

Madonna, with husband Guy Ritchie and friends, had only been riding a few months.

She added: "So I go on, and he went crazy and I went down. I was thinking 'I'm graceful, I'm a dancer, I'm going to land, I'm going to roll and it's going to be fine'."

Instead, she fell heavily on the hard ground. Madonna told US show Primetime: "I tried to stand up and my whole skeleton collapsed on me and I fainted." The accident nearly derailed Madonna's new album Confessions On A Dance Floor. She said: "I cried a lot, mostly from pain. When you can't set bones it's painful."

- A BELGIAN songwriter has won a court battle against Madonna for plagiarism in her 1998 hit Frozen.